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> Can one not understand something about how cultures work without knowing how brains work? Yes, you can, but that's psychology or sociology, not neuroscience.
by ajuc 9y ago
> Can one not understand something about how cultures work without knowing how brains work?
Yes, you can, but that's psychology or sociology, not neuroscience. The goal was to understand brain, and be able to replicate it or modify it. Understanding just the behaviour is like understanding that pressing "fire" will shoot in Space Invaders. It's something, but you don't need to dissect a CPU to know that, and it doesn't move you closer to creating your own CPU or modifying this one.
> the only worthwhile understanding of phenomena is from the bottom
That's misrepresentation of my point. I wrote that in the CPU example neuroscience tools failed because of missing the abstraction levels between transistors and behaviours.
> there is some true level of description at which something must be understood
There is optimal level of description, yes. And notation makes a huge difference.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoNeuroscience works at a number of levels of description or size. Neuroscience which focuses on synapses Neuroscience that focuses on dendritic tree or whole neurons, Neuroscience that ask questions of small groups of neurons, and Neuroscience that focuses on large scale networks. Most try to relate that function at that level to behavior in some way and to bridge the gap between levels of description. When we try to understand deep learning, do we try to understand it at the level of individual transistors, at the level of a 'neuron', at layers, or at the level overall design? Well it depends, right?
- ajuc 9y agoI'm not a scientist, but it seems the various groupings of neurons yout enumerated are still hardware level, and not the software level. Maybe there really is no software level between hardware level and behaviours, but it seems unlikely to me, because I can think about abstract ideas using that brain.